A palace is mined from transcripts, and transcripts contain whatever the terminal
printed. Measured on this fleet: one leaked bearer token had reached 3 drawers,
13 feeder inbox files across all three devices, and 10 local files spanning 10
days — from an agent inspecting an env var while debugging. That frequency is the
premise: this is a pipeline problem, not a discipline problem.
WHERE. bin/mempalace_redact.py, called from mempalace-pi-session at the point the
staged transcript is written. That single hook covers both transports, because
local mode mines the staged file and remote mode rsyncs that same file
byte-for-byte. Scrubbing operates on the parsed objects rather than the
serialized text, so string values are rewritten while keys, ids and structure are
untouched — scanning raw JSONL instead invents keys like "tapiKey" out of the \t
escape preceding a field name (observed, not theorised).
WHY NOT ENTROPY. The obvious "redact long random-looking strings" is actively
destructive here: drawer ids, chunk ids, event ids, replica ids, HLCs and commit
SHAs are all high-entropy, are the majority of random-looking text in a palace,
and redacting them is silent and permanent. Detection is anchored on meaning
instead: tier 1 literal values from this process's env whose NAME says secret
(zero false positives by construction, and the only tier that can tell a 40-hex
Gitea PAT from a git commit sha); tier 2 vendor-prefixed shapes (ghp_, glpat-,
xox*-, sk-, AKIA, AIza, hf_, JWT, PEM blocks, URL credentials, Authorization
headers); tier 3 name=value assignments.
THE MEASUREMENT THAT CHANGED THE DESIGN. Tier 3 was going to redact. Against
52 MB of real fleet transcripts it produced 403 hits, and inspection with values
masked showed most were ${VAR} interpolation in compose files, TypeScript
identifiers, a TYPE ANNOTATION (credentials: Credentials), an IPA attribute
holding a date (krbPasswordExpiration), AAAK diary shorthand, and terminal output
following a "Password:" prompt. Redacting those corrupts code and docs held as
memory to catch what tier 1 already catches by value. After adding guards for
interpolation, code context, non-secret key suffixes and all-digit values, the
enforced count fell 403 -> 29 on the same corpus. So tier 3 REPORTS and does not
rewrite unless MEMPALACE_REDACT_STRICT=1.
HONESTY ABOUT MISSES. Known false negatives are documented rather than papered
over: novel formats in bare prose, another machine's secrets, base64-of-a-secret,
line-split secrets. Every run prints a count including "0 redaction(s)", because
silence is indistinguishable from a scrubber that never ran, and suspicions()
reports high-entropy strings it did NOT redact as (length, fingerprint) so the
miss rate is measurable. Findings never carry the value — rule, label, length and
sha256[:8], enough to recognise a recurrence, not enough to recover the secret.
FAIL CLOSED: no scrubber, no staging (exit 3), overridable with
MEMPALACE_FEED_ALLOW_UNSCRUBBED=1 for a machine older than this file.
Tested: 42-case corpus in --self-test, including every palace id shape as a
must-not-redact case, idempotency, and a compound case the corpus caught where a
vendor placeholder was then re-matched by the URL rule (nested placeholder — the
secret was hidden either way, so only an exact-output assertion catches it).
End-to-end on 45 real sessions: 29 enforced, fail-closed verified at rc=3,
override verified loud. Server-side layer specified in docs/secret-hygiene.md §5
but NOT implemented — it is tier 2 only there, since the hub cannot see a
client's environment.
